I was fifteen, working my first job at McDonald’s. I ended up at the drink station a lot. You’d press a button to fill a soda—small, medium, large, and I think there was even an extra-small—but it never quite filled the cup all the way. And you didn’t want to leave an inch and a half of air under the lid. People noticed. You wanted the drink to come up within maybe half to three-quarters of a centimeter from the top.
That part—the final fill—was up to you, depending on how much ice the customer wanted.
The tricky part was when the carbonation was a little off and the soda would foam like crazy. You couldn’t see where the liquid actually was. Some coworkers would just walk away and come back later to top it off. Others didn’t care if it was a little underfilled. I wasn’t great at multitasking, and sometimes I’d forget what drink went with which order. So I stayed put and tried to finish each drink before moving on.
Somewhere along the way, I started gently rocking the cup if it was fizzy—just a little side-to-side motion—to help me eyeball where the liquid line was under all that foam. It worked really well for me. No point doing it if the fizz was about to spill over, of course. But short of that, it worked great. I did it for years. It wasn’t something I consciously thought about, and I didn’t really have language to explain it. It was just something I’d picked up intuitively.
One day, my manager saw me doing it.
“Shaking it doesn’t make the fizz go down,” she said.
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what she meant.
Later:
“Shaking it doesn’t help. It doesn’t make a difference.”
I just blinked.
Doesn’t help?
What difference?
What is she even talking about?
She said it again, a while later—this time slower, as if I were stupid:
“Shaking. The cup. Does. Not. Make. The fizz. Go down. Faster.”
In my head, I was just trying to get the drink right. The rocking helped. I wasn’t shaking it. I wasn’t doing anything to the fizz. I wasn’t even sure what her words had to do with what I was doing.
But I didn’t have the language to say any of that. I didn’t even think in those terms yet. I just remember the feeling of her words sliding past with nowhere to land. It wasn’t advice. It wasn’t correction. It was just… noise. Irrelevant, unexplained noise.
It took months—maybe years—for me to figure out what she must have thought she was seeing. And to realize she never once asked what I was doing or why.
Looking back, I can see the neurodivergence in that moment. The intuitive process I couldn’t articulate. Her literal but incorrect interpretation. The way her comment didn’t even register as something that applied to me. I wasn’t being defiant or ignoring her. I genuinely didn’t understand what she was trying to say or why it was relevant.
And that’s the thing I think neurotypical folks often miss: it’s easy to see what she thought she saw. It’s easy to project your own experience onto someone else and assume you understand their process.
But what I was very bad at then—and only got better at later—was seeing that kind of mismatch from the outside. At the time, it was genuinely confusing that she was even talking to me. Her words didn’t fit anything I was doing. I couldn’t find anything useful in them, so I just kept going. I didn’t try to explain my process. I didn’t know I had a process.
So here’s the real question: was I right?
What if that little rocking motion didn’t actually help me eyeball the liquid level? What if it only felt useful but wasn’t? What if my drink-rocking really was pointless?
And the answer is: it doesn’t matter at all.
She wasn’t offering advice to help me improve. She wasn’t trying to understand my process or increase my efficiency. And even if that small motion only felt helpful—it was helpful, because it kept me focused, on-task, and moving forward.
So here’s my unsolicited bit of advice—file it away if you’ve got a place for it:
If someone’s odd little habit isn’t hurting anything, let it be.
Not every process needs to be corrected.
Not every behavior needs to make sense to you in order to be valid.
The goal is getting the work done—and if it’s getting done, and getting done well, maybe don’t worry so much if someone’s rocking the drink a little.